


The Plague Returned in Winter

by Mithrigil



Category: Sengoku Basara
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Loyalty, Major Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 20:52:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1164398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s smallpox,” the doctor says, before the shoji is even fully open. “Quarantine the castle immediately and send someone to inform the boy’s father.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Plague Returned in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Masamune is referred to by his childhood name, Bontenmaru, throughout this fic, since he's about ten years old. Kojuro's given name, Kagetsuna, is also used once or twice.

“It’s smallpox,” the doctor says, before the shoji is even fully open. “Quarantine the castle immediately and send someone to inform the boy’s father.”

“Let me see him,” Kojuro says.

“I can’t let you in there, Lord Katakura.”

Kojuro jerks aside the collar of his kimono, reveals the tiny white scars that line his throat. “I survived it ten years ago. It won’t get me again.”

That’s all the proof the doctor needs to bow and stand aside. But he doesn’t go quietly, and he gets in another warning before Kojuro is through: “At least it will be over for him soon.”

Kojuro only manages to stop his fist halfway to the doctor’s face.

***

“It’s not that bad,” Bontenmaru says. “See?” He reaches up to his cheek where the pocks are thickest, clustered red and not that small at all along his hairline. But pointing turns in to rubbing, and the rubbing turns to scratching, and Kojuro gently takes Bontenmaru’s hand and holds it, tight.

“It’s not,” he agrees. Bontenmaru has always been sick, or injured, or getting into trouble and just barely scraping by, and he’s no stranger to confinement: he’s escaped it every single time. But this is different. This time, Bontenmaru has to understand that no matter how bored he gets, he can’t leave the main house, can’t see his mother or little brother, can’t touch his father’s clothes or the practice swords or even his own skin. But he has Kojuro. It has to be enough.

Nothing is ever enough for him.

Still holding on to Kojuro’s hand, Bontenmaru nestles into the futon, fidgets since he can’t scratch. “How old were you when you had it?”

“About your age.”

“Did you cough?”

“Worse. I couldn’t keep anything down and coughed it all back up.”

Bontenmaru laughs, his breath wet against Kojuro’s thigh. His fever is high enough that Kojuro’s sweating too from being this close, even though it’s cold enough outside that the troughs froze over. “Gross.”

“Yeah.”

“This is gonna be like the time I ate the hermit crab while it was still alive, isn’t it.”

_Worse,_ Kojuro thinks. “Different,” he says instead. “But you have to stay here and rest. That’s the quickest way to get better. You have to ride it out.”

“Can’t ride it out if I can’t ride.”

“I meant ride out the sickness. Pretend you’re racing it. You can’t go too fast straight out of the gate or you’ll tire out the horse, remember? This is like that.”

Bontenmaru scoffs. “Slow and steady doesn’t win any races, Kojuro.”

“I didn’t say _slow_. But _steady_ will win this one.”

“You said _not fast_. That’s the same as slow.”

Kojuro sighs. “Remember when you broke your right arm the first time?”

“Yeah?”

“You thought you were going to have to give up the sword forever. But you stopped for a while, and thought about it, and then you learned to use your left hand too. This is like that. You have to trick the sickness. You have to be smarter than it. Fight just enough to let it tire itself out first, so that when it’s weak, you can push ahead.”

Bontenmaru nods, then keeps nodding until it’s almost more of a nuzzle against Kojuro’s thigh. Or--

“And don’t scratch,” Kojuro adds, quickly.

“Aww, you’re no fun.”

***

It isn’t as if the main house is like a prison. There are still courtyards, and even if it’s too cold for Bontenmaru to go outside, Kojuro can, when he has a few spare minutes. His garden is off-limits, but the ground has been frozen for a week and it may be best to leave the plants alone. And there are rooms large enough to train in, but no one except Lord Terumune is of comparable skill, and Kojuro won’t ask him to spar.

But the conversation, at least, is a distraction.

“He’s out cold?”

Kojuro nods. “For the past half an hour.”

“That’s better than yesterday. What’d they drug him with?”

“They didn’t. He refused to take any opium.”

Terumune laughs, tilting his head back so his throat’s exposed, and runs a hand through his hair. “Even now.”

“My Lord?”

“You’re letting him walk all over you.”

“I wouldn’t have if I didn’t think he was right to refuse it. It didn’t look like the kind I used ten years ago.”

“It’s been ten years. The world’s moving forward.” Terumune wrings a crick out of his shoulders and sits down on the porch, sprawls to the side like he’s taking ownership of the entire courtyard -- as if he as to, as if this land isn’t already his. “But if you say something’s fishy, I’ll believe it. You’ve never been one to cry wolf, Kagetsuna.”

“No, my Lord.”

Terumune sighs, leans his head onto the pillar, and stares out over the icy white ground. “So tell me straight. Is my son going to survive?”

Kojuro does not _hesitate_. He pauses, and breathes, and chooses his words carefully, but that’s not the same as hesitating. “He’s never fought worse than this. But he can win.”

Terumune laughs, just once, and if Kojuro didn’t know this man so well he would be much angrier. “Between you and me, I hope so.”

***

“But I don’t want to!”

“Then don’t scratch.” Kojuro grits his teeth, holds on tight to the bandages in his hands, as if that could hide them. “You only have to wear them when you sleep.”

“Then I won’t sleep!” Bontenmaru balls up his fists and sits on them. “See?”

“Young Master, you can’t stop scratching even when you’re awake. You won’t be able to stop yourself if you don’t even know you’re doing it.”

“I said I won’t sleep!”

Kojuro sighs. “If you don’t sleep, the fever will get worse.”

Bontenmaru doesn’t make any move toward his pillow. If it’s at all possible, he sits down harder on his hands. “What does sleeping have to do with a fever anyway.”

“If your body isn’t rested, it won’t get better.”

“I’ve been resting all the time! I’m not doing anything else!” He raises his fists, then looks at the bandages in Kojuro’s hands and hides them again. How Bontenmaru can focus on anything at all right now is a marvel: the pocks on his face have swelled up so thickly that it’s impossible to count them (they both know: Bontenmaru tried), and his eyes look more like dimples of shadow in the clusters of rocky red skin. “It’s not getting any better.”

“It takes time, Young Master. And rest.”

“I told you I’ve been resting! You know that! You’re the one that’s not resting.”

“Of course I am.”

“No, you’re not! You’re here all the time, and the rest of the time you get to go train, and you get to run around with the doctors and talk to my old man and go outside. And you’re awake every time I’m awake.”

Kojuro shuts his eyes. “Fine. If I sleep, will you sleep?” It’s a question he hasn’t asked since Bontenmaru was five, and he’s sure that it won’t work.

But surprisingly, Bontenmaru hangs his head and says, “Fine. Only if you sleep here.”

Kojuro smiles, as best he can. “And only if you let me wrap your hands so you don’t scratch.”

Bontenmaru pounds his hands into the futon. “Kojuro!”

“I had to wear them for two whole weeks. You can do it for one night, can’t you?”

Scowling, Bontenmaru holds out his fists, just as swollen as his face and chest, and Kojuro wraps them up in the plain white silk. 

Telling the Young Master he can’t do something is a surefire way to get him to do it. It always has been.

But Kojuro can’t bring himself to say _There’s a chance you can’t survive._

***

Yoshihime has not come to the main house all week. It’s understandable: Bontenmaru’s younger brother Jiromaru is only six, and Yoshihime has been hinting that she might be pregnant again, so there is no sense at all in her coming near the quarantine. Frankly, Kojuro is thankful. He’d never speak against his lord’s wife, but to call her prudent for staying away at a time like this is the nicest thought he’s had of her in a good long while.

But there is a view from the front yard, and the snow on the ground is soft enough to play in, and Jiromaru can’t play alone.

Kojuro watches from the porch: little Jiromaru scuttles around in the snow, patting it into place. He’s building a fort, Kojuro thinks, or at least a little wall. Yoshihime sits on a palanquin, wrapped in furs, laughing as the boy shoves piles of snow into an artless wall until his hands turn red. He squeals, loud enough to echo, and she calls him over to the palanquin, bundles him up and warns him that no, they can’t go up the hill for more snow.

She never once glances at the house, never mentions Bontenmaru. Neither does the boy.

Kojuro goes inside to check, and Bontenmaru is still asleep. When he comes back out, to gather fresh snow to cool Bontenmaru’s fever, Yoshihime and Jiromaru are already gone, leaving nothing but tracks and an empty white wall.

***

Yesterday the fever was spiders. Today it’s worms.

“Let me kill them,” Bontenmaru whines, louder than he should with all that dry hoarseness in his throat. “Let me kill them! They’re gonna eat me!”

Kojuro holds Bontenmaru’s wrapped hands and does not let go.

“They’re gonna eat me! I wanna fight! I have to fight them!” Bontenmaru twists, not that Kojuro lets him get far at all, kicks hard enough to crack the straw mats on the floor. “You said to fight! Let me fight!”

“You are fighting,” Kojuro tries to say. The words fall on swollen, insensate ears.

Terumune stands in the open shoji, one hand on the jamb, and meets Kojuro’s eyes, but does not move. He watches the struggle, breathes the stale air, and says nothing aloud. But even though Kojuro has read this man’s silences for years now, this one won’t translate.

Bontenmaru shrieks and kicks and throws himself against Kojuro’s chest, over and over until his sweat has left stains on Kojuro’s clothes. It finally tires him out, whole minutes later, and he curls up in Kojuro’s lap, panting and sobbing. “Mom,” he says. “Mom, I’m sorry. Don’t go. I’ll kill the worms, don’t go.”

Terumune shuts the shoji. His shadow and his footsteps taper away, into the dark of the house, and Kojuro holds Bontenmaru tight so he doesn’t try to follow.

***

It snows again, all night, and most of the next morning, Piles of it form mountains against the fusuma, and Kojuro doesn’t have to go far at all to gather it. It’s piled a whole hand high on the porch, deep enough to bury any shoes that might have been left outside.

He stands for a minute, shuts his eyes, breathes. A frigid gust of wind blasts the sweat on his neck and shoulders, freezes it almost instantly. Snow drifts into the room, rustles the medicine-wrappers on the floor, the fringe of the good-health charms over the inner shoji, Bontenmaru’s scraggly hair.

“Kojuro?” he whispers.

“I’m here.”

“Tell me a story.”

He hasn’t asked that in years, but sickness makes you younger, smaller, and Kojuro won’t say anything but “Yes.” He gathers up a bowl of snow and shuts the fusuma tight, sets it by Bontenmaru’s bedside. Bontenmaru curls up in his lap and pulls on his hair, so Kojuro sighs, gives in to his fatigue and stretches out beside him on the futon and lets Bontenmaru cling, as best he can with the bandages on his hands.

“Not so long ago,” Kojuro says, “there was a priest at a shrine on a high mountain in the north. He wasn’t that old, but he was already tired of the ordinary world. He hung his sword up over the shrine altar and never wanted to use it again, and tended the shrine’s farm every day instead of fighting, and he thought he was happy.

“One day, a young warrior came to pray at the shrine. He had messy hair and light eyes, just like you, and he was strong and fast. He knelt and paid his respects, but the whole time he prayed, he seemed to be laughing, and the priest was confused.

“When the young warrior was done, the priest asked him, _Sir, what do you pray for?_

“He said, _I pray for strength. My father is dead, and I’m supposed to be the lord of Oshu now, but my uncles and aunts don’t think I’m ready and are saying I’m not._

“ _Then how are you laughing?_ the priest asked.

“ _I’m laughing because I’ve waited so long to prove to them how smart I am, and now I have the chance._ ”

Bontenmaru grins, then coughs and turns his face into Kojuro’s shoulder. Kojuro waits for the fit to pass, cards his hand through Bontenmaru’s hair, and goes on.

“The priest thought that was arrogant and unbecoming, and said so. He said, _Nevertheless, these people are your family. Just because you have an opportunity to show them up doesn’t make it smart, or any more pious for you to laugh at your father’s death._

“But the warrior said, _I’m not laughing at his death. He’d want me to smile and show them up. We’re Date, we’re dragons, and that’s how we fly._

“ _So you pray for strength,_ the priest said.

“ _Yeah,_ the warrior said. _His._

“The priest said nothing more after that, and the warrior left the mountain.

“A year passed, and the priest farmed at the shrine and did not think much about the warrior. But every night, he had a dream about a dragon being chased by snakes, and woke up wondering what it meant.

“The next year, the warrior came to the shrine again. If it weren’t for his eyes, the priest might not have recognized him, because he seemed much more than a year older, and his armor was chipped and his clothes were torn. The warrior prayed at the shrine, and rang the bell, and his laughter was different, more sour somehow.

“The priest asked him, _Sir, what do you pray for now?_

“ _Wits,_ the warrior said. _I’ve got strength, but it’s not enough now. Turns out my aunts and uncles were right that I wasn’t ready to take them all on, and they tricked me. My army is hanging on, but I don’t know how much longer we can fly._

“The priest couldn’t help smiling, since it seemed like the warrior had grown up a lot in the last year, even if it was from hardship. He said, _Those who have wit usually find that it’s best to turn away from war._

“The warrior asked him, _Is that what you did?_ When the priest didn’t answer, the warrior said, _I saw the sword on the wall. It’s yours, isn’t it._

“The priest said, _Yes. It’s mine. I served my family and fought in the shogun’s wars. But I don’t have anything to fight for now._ ”

Bontenmaru shivers, curls closer to Kojuro, holds on to his arm. Kojuro smoothes back his hair, careful of the thick red rash, and can’t tell whether he’s still awake or not until he whines, quietly, “Don’t stop.”

“All right.” He clears his throat, settles back down. “The priest said, _I don’t have anything to fight for now._ And the warrior laughed at him, but it was bitter laughter, not at the priest’s expense.

“The warrior said, _Who knows? Maybe I’ll join you up here, if no one answers my prayers._

“The warrior left the mountain again, and another year went by. The priest dreamed of the dragon every night, and the snakes caught up with him, bit through his wings and brought him down out of the sky. And then the warrior came to the mountain again, with his armor and clothes in an even worse state, and he was unarmed. But he laughed all through his prayers.

“The priest put down his spade, and went to the warrior at the shrine. The warrior kept laughing, but his eyes weren’t cast down in prayer: he was looking at the sword on the wall.

“And the priest asked him, _Sir, what do you pray for now?_

“ _A friend,_ he said. _I’ve got wit and I’ve got strength, but you were right, both times. I need a hand._

“The priest laughed too, and said, _I don’t think a friend is something you pray for._

“ _But it’s something you ask for,_ the warrior said, _and I’m asking you. How about it?_

“The priest said, _I’ve left that world behind. My sword is yours if you want it, but this is my life now._

“The warrior took the priest’s hand, and said, _You are the sword. Come down with me. Dragons like us are meant to fly._ ”

Bontenmaru laughs, though it’s weak and tired. “Dragons like us,” he says.

Kojuro smiles. “Exactly. The priest left the shrine behind, and they came down the mountain together. The warrior took back his domain because of the priest’s help, and was stronger than he’d ever been, and they were always together after that. And they both took wives, and they both had sons, and one of them was me,” Kojuro’s throat runs dry, but he finishes, “and one of them was you.”

Snow and wind beat against the fusuma, and Bontenmaru buries his face in Kojuro’s sleeve. “Would you come down the mountain for me?”

“I’m already here,” Kojuro says.

“Good,” Bontenmaru whispers. “’Cause you’re mine.”

He sleeps, after that, but Kojuro doesn’t. He won’t. Not if there’s a chance at all that Bontenmaru won’t wake up.

***

“Get some rest,” the doctor says.

Kojuro says, simply, “Go to hell.”

***

Bitter cold creeps under the fusuma. The wind lets none of the stale air out, just pushes it around the room until even the hearth isn’t warm at all. Kojuro paces the perimeter until he can’t count the steps anymore. He tries eating, but tastes nothing. He tries reading, but the kanji swim all over the pages. He tries training, but every hiss of his sword through the air sounds like Bontenmaru’s breath and he keeps having to check, _is it faster, is it slower, is it stronger._

If the sun rises, it’s trapped behind a hide-white wall of clouds, and Kojuro doesn’t see it.

The doctors come and go, to clean Bontenmaru’s body and change his sheets and light new incense. They don’t bother asking how the boy is, because he’s barely lucid. He coughs and stirs and mumbles, but his eyes are too swollen to open, and he doesn’t ask for Kojuro anymore.

He doesn’t ask for anything, anymore.

But his breath rattles the air, like the sound of a mouse scurrying on straw, and his heart still beats, and Kojuro paces.

The interior shoji snaps open, and Kojuro goes for his sword, draws it a hand’s-breadth out of the sheath. In the shadows, there’s a creature with pale hands and dark hair. It’s not the first time he’s mistaken Lady Yoshihime for a bone-maiden: with her long loose hair and the thick furs she’s wrapped in, it’s an easy mistake. He relaxes his grip on the sword, just a touch.

“Katakura,” she says. “Let me see my son.”

There’s grief in her voice, which he’s never heard before -- she’s quiet, shivering, and even if she doesn’t lower her eyes he can see the fatigue in them, just like his own.

“Yes, my Lady,” he says, and stands aside.

She comes in to the room, shuts the shoji behind her. In her other hand, she has a faintly steaming kettle with one empty cup, and it swings gently like a lantern as she comes nearer, kneels by Bontenmaru’s bed. Her hand is ghastly pale against the red pocks on Bontenmaru’s skin. She strokes his hair back from his forehead, flinches at the heat and the thick scabs, but doesn’t remove her hand.

“He’s so small,” she whispers. “He’s always been so small.”

Kojuro lets go of the sword, backs one step away, too tired to keep his jaw from tightening. “He’ll grow.”

Yoshihime’s breath hitches, and she keels forward. Something glimmers in the dark, and Kojuro’s horrified and surprised to find tears splattered on Bontenmaru’s blanket. “You did your best,” she says. “We all did. Some things just can’t be helped.”

Kojuro remembers his mother, how disappointed she could be in him, how stern and perfect she was, how when she wrote or counted or folded her hands it was like a dance in the moonlight. How he hated himself for never being calm enough, strict enough, or strong enough. She said she loved him, even so, but how could she love a son like him, who broke his friend’s noses and punched holes in the walls and felt such scary, hateful things?

_The same way,_ he thinks, _that I can love a troublemaker like Bonten._

Yoshihime wipes her tears away on her sleeve. Kojuro turns away, politely. “My lady, forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive, Katakura. As I said, you did your best.”

“I can do better.”

She laughs, softer, bitterer than her husband’s. “You always say that. It has to run dry, sometime.”

“No, my Lady. It doesn’t.”

She reaches up to him, touches his hand. He has to wonder if she’s ever touched him at all before now, and either he’s too drained to remember or no, she hasn’t. Her fingers are like ice. “No one would ever ask you to do more. I know we’ve had our differences, these last few years, but I would never underwrite your loyalty. You’ve done enough, Katakura. Let me do the rest.”

He owes it to her, he thinks. She’s come here, and put herself at risk, to care for her son. And he’s more hers than his: Kojuro may belong to Bontenmaru, but Bontenmaru belongs to his mother, or they belong to each other. He remembers how Bontenmaru cried out for her in the throes of his fever, not him.

Maybe she can do what he can’t.

Maybe the doctors are right, and Kojuro’s too tired to fight anymore.

“I understand,” he says, and bows to her, to Bontenmaru. “I’ll return in the morning.”

She nods to him, picks up the kettle. By the time Kojuro has turned his back, the sounds of curling steam and pouring tea have drowned out Bontenmaru’s faint breath. Kojuro slides the shoji open, steps out into the hall for the first time in days, and shuts it behind him.

For a moment, he simply closes his eyes, listens. The house is as silent as a boneyard, without even a page in the hall or an insect in the air.

In that second of silence, Bontenmaru bursts into a hacking cough, and something sprays through the air and splatters, hot and hissing, and Kojuro remembers:

Yoshihime only spoke of her son in the past tense.

He barges back into the room, snaps the paper of the shoji and doesn’t give it a second thought. Yoshihime has Bontenmaru wrapped in her arms, a hand pinched over his nose to force him to drink -- tea, _poison_ , she came here to hurt him. To kill him.

Kojuro will kill her.

She has no time to protect herself, she _deserves_ no time to protect herself, and Kojuro grabs her throat and crushes it, slams her into the fusuma and holds her there. She flails, but it does nothing, and her pale hands can’t cut into the red haze in Kojuro’s eyes. “I serve your husband,” he growls. “I serve your son. I don’t serve you. Give me one good reason to let you live or I will rip your fucking throat out.”

She doesn’t. She coughs, chokes, wrenches her fingernails toward his face. He rams her into the fusuma again, hopes her skull cracks. It doesn’t, but something else snaps, and Kojuro catches the white flash of a blade a second too late. Cold bites into his cheek, and blood sears his vision, but he only tightens his grip. It’s a knife, the blade streaked with his blood, and he stabs his arm between them to grab it and twist, break her wrist. It hits the floor blade-first, louder than her ragged attempt at screaming.

He leans in, makes it clear he could snap her neck just like her wrist. “He’s your _son._ ”

If she’s trying to apologize, it doesn’t work.

“Go to hell,” he tells her. “You won’t see him there.”

“Kagetsuna, let her go!”

Lord Terumune. He’s in the hall, behind the ruins of the shoji.

Kojuro does as his lord commands, even if his hands still ache to kill her. He lets Yoshihime fall, and hits the floor, presses his forehead to the mat. Blood pours down his cheek and splatters in the woven straw, and all the pain in his face and knuckles hits him at once. “My lord. She tried to poison the Young Master.” The words bark out of him, still bestial, still shameful. “Please. Have the contents of that kettle checked immediately.”

Terumune says nothing, and Yoshihime’s heaving sobs echo through the room. Kojuro doesn’t move, not even to help her or check on Bontenmaru -- Bontenmaru, who’s still coughing and whimpering on his futon, still breathing, still alive.

This is worth it. Every drop of Kojuro’s blood, every scrap of his honor, is worth it.

Yoshihime wheezes, finally gets words out. “Damn you,” she says, barely a whisper. “He’s suffering.”

Terumune scoffs. “So it’s true.”

Yoshihime holds her tongue, after that, just curls up and sobs. 

Terumune comes nearer, but Kojuro doesn’t look up, barely even dares to breathe. He saved Bontenmaru’s life. He can die happily, assured of that. When all this is done, he’ll offer it up in earnest, and Bontenmaru will wake tomorrow morning and live a happy life. That’s it. That’s everything.

Kojuro kneels there, forehead to the floor, all through the chaos. Doctors take Yoshihime away and help Bontenmaru hack up the rest of the poison, Terumune snaps orders at pages and servants, and Kojuro makes peace with his life. Twenty years is more than some people get, more than he’d get if he went off to war, and plenty of time to serve his lord. And it’s more than he deserves, after making an attempt on his daimyo wife’s life, no matter the circumstances. If Terumune has any mercy, he’ll let Kojuro do it himself.

Someone comes to him, touches his shoulder. “Are you wounded too, Lord Katakura?”

Kojuro looks up. That’s all the answer the doctor apparently needs, because in that instant he looks over his shoulder and yells for clean linen and water and thread, and Kojuro finally catches sight of his daimyo’s eyes.

He has spent years learning to read Terumune’s face, down to the barest twitch.

He can’t read it now. Not through Terumune’s tears.

“My lord,” he says. “Please, don’t let the doctors trouble themselves. I don’t need them to sew the cut.”

“Oh?”

Kojuro reaches to the knife that Yoshihime slashed him with, takes it up and passes it to his left hand. “I have made an attempt on the life of your wife and allowed the Young Master to come to harm.” He opens his kimono, presses the frozen tip of the knife to his skin. “For that, I know I must die. Please permit me to commit seppuku.”

Terumune backhands him on the bleeding cheek, so hard he sees stars.

“Don’t you dare leave my son,” he says, while Kojuro’s world is still ringing and spinning. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

***

The lashes sting more than the stitches. There are fifty of each, the stitches cool and stale on his cheek, the lashes fresh and wet all up and down his back. Everything will scar, but the next round of tattoos on his back will hide the worst of the whipping, once everything’s healed. The scar on his cheek will probably be with him for life.

It’s worth it. Everything’s worth it. Terumune flogged him so soundly that ice cracked and Kojuro mistook it for bone at first, but this is mercy. This is a chance to do better.

He comes in to Bontenmaru’s room, shuts the shoji behind him, tries to shut out the pain that flares up with every step. All of this has been for Bontenmaru. That thought helps, and the sight of Bontenmaru’s gently rising and falling chest works wonders. Kojuro sinks to a kneel at his side, puts his hand to Bontenmaru’s scabbed forehead.

It’s cooler than it was.

And Bontenmaru scrunches his eyes, stirs in his sleep. “Kojuro?”

“I’m here,” Kojuro says. “I’ll always be here.”

Bontenmaru snuggles closer, and Kojuro lies down beside him, shuts his eyes, and sleeps for the first time in days.

***

He wakes, to blazing sunlight and a familiar hand yanking on his hair.

“Kojuro,” Bontenmaru whines. “Kojuro, let me up. I want water.”

It takes Kojuro one breath to register the pain in his back and face, and another to realize that this is not a dream. Bontenmaru is awake. Bontenmaru is _alive_ , and awake, and well enough to complain.

Kojuro wraps his arms around him and holds on tight. Tears well up at the corners of his eyes but don’t quite fall, no matter how many heartbeats assure him that it’s true, he’s here, he made it through.

“Kojuro,” he whines again. “I said water.”

Kojuro smiles, no matter how much it hurts. “In a second.”

“It’s been a second. I’m thirsty.”

“All right, fine.” Kojuro straightens up as much as he can, gathers himself to a kneel: the lashes on his back have scabbed over, and apparently frozen overnight, so even pushing himself up like this spears pain down from his shoulders.

Bontenmaru isn’t just well enough to complain, he’s well enough to notice. “Kojuro? What’s wrong?”

Kojuro can’t stop smiling. “Do you want me to tell you, or do you want me to get you water?”

“Both.”

He’s definitely back.

“Water first,” Kojuro says. He gets himself all the way up, goes to the fusuma -- they replaced it during Kojuro’s flogging, looks like -- and scoops up some fresh snow to melt by the stove. He will not let anything pass Bontenmaru’s lips without tasting it first. Not now.

“I dreamed that Mom turned into a snake,” Bontenmaru says. “And you had to wrestle her.”

Kojuro freezes. “If I told you that it was a little bit true, would you believe me?”

For a few seconds, Bontenmaru doesn’t answer, and the snow melts into water. “Mom’s a snake?”

“No,” Kojuro starts, but doesn’t say _she’s worse_ , doesn’t know how much else he’s allowed to tell. “But I did have to fight her. So I got switched for it. Your father will tell you the rest of the story, all right? Here, have some water.”

It’s enough, at least for now. Bontenmaru drinks, cupping the bowl in his bandaged hands all on his own. He seems to have some trouble giving the bowl back when he’s done, but that could be any number of things.

All the pocks on Bontenmaru’s face have burst, into a thick crust of brown and gold scabs. Almost everything is still swollen or gummed shut, so it’s a wonder he can see at all, but he’ll make it through. He’ll live. Kojuro remembers his own illness, how it got inside his ear and the doctors checked him afterward for weeks to make sure nothing burst near his brain. Bontenmaru will have to endure that, all that care and scrutiny, but it won’t be worse than this. Nothing will be worse than this.

Not if Kojuro can help it.

This sickness has already taken his mother, his strength. Kojuro can be that for him, and if it takes anything else of his, he’ll be that too. He swears it.

“Kojuro?”

“I’m here.”

“Tell me another story.”

Kojuro settles down beside him, smiles as much as the scar on his cheek allows. “Of course.”

******


End file.
